Communism... opinions?

If you think I'm putting my life in the hands of any god, alien, or robot, then you're an idiot. Putting my life in the hands of other human beings is already a huge enough risk. I'm not freaking suicidal yet.

We Are Our Avatars Forever (Now on Discord by invitation, PM)

^ His opinion ain't unusual, buddy.

Again with the data mining, dear Aunt?

Don't care. I still stand by my statement◊.

We Are Our Avatars Forever (Now on Discord by invitation, PM)

I meant yours.

Again with the data mining, dear Aunt?

Oh. Whoops. Sorry about that.

We Are Our Avatars Forever (Now on Discord by invitation, PM)

It was ambiguous.

Again with the data mining, dear Aunt?

Oh, I'm back. Just saying: humans fail each other, but brogress is built based on trust and ethics and belief in a set of rules. There are those who may exploit them, and those who may take the risk to break them, but even they depend on those rules to exist and thrive. Many proponents of pure capitalism claim that all those systems would crash down because of "human nature", and declare Hobbes Was Right and Humans Are Bastards. Humans Are Flawed and that's it. You wanna know what pure, unbridled capitalism with no rules is like? Have a look at some South American and Southeast Asian countries.

See, life is largely a huge Prisonner's Dilemma. The question is, do you want to live in a world in which all betray each other and everyone is harmed, or in one where all trust each other?

I chose the latter. I chose to never betray my word, never blunder, never fail those who trust me. Sometimes, I do fail people. And then I am dismayed. Not because of the cost to myself, which is usually small or even inexistent, but because I have dented their faith in others.

'''YOU SEE THIS DOG I'M PETTING? THAT WAS COURAGE WOLF.Cute, isn't he?

^ To correct a faulty assumption, I certainly wasn't arguing for perfect capitalism, and I don't think anyone else was, either. Most countries these days acknowledge that a mix of free markets and government regulation is required to obtain the best performance from a system while minimizing risks.

Pure Capitalism is as misguided a principle as pure Communism; both depend on a false notion of human nature. In the first case, it's that market forces inherently act as a disincentive to unethical behavior; and in the second, it's that humans are capable of perfect altruism given the opportunity.

Well, aren't you special. I shall nominate you for sainthood the next time I talk to the Pope. In the meantime, people who aren't quite so resplendently messianic will happily take all you have to offer while leaving you nothing.

Not to sound too cynical, let me state that I appreciate the ideal you espouse. I just recognize that it's not realistic to expect all human beings to magically turn themselves into Purity Sues on your say so.

edited 4th Aug '10 9:50:16 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Nah, as for me, I behave endeavour to behave in a way to promote people's faith in each other, including gratuitous help (I still fail much more than I would like: honest mistakes are forgivable, but oftentimes laziness and negligence just get the better of me, and I have a hard time both forgiving myself for that and working to change it: I am really really lazy). Because it's an elightened, long-term self-interest. I never said I trusted them. But the appearance of trust is oftentimes more important to people and more formative and stimulating thant actual trust, which is, in my opinion, laying an unfair burden on them, for which they might not be ready, and which they might not welcome. I was very surprised when reading Ciaphas Cain for the first time to find how he implicitly seemed to share this philosophy.

Back on topic: Creating a fair, good social system is like recycling: you gotta start separating garbage yourself. First you'll feel alone and stupid and many will make fun of you, and one day you'll find that everyone is doing it and you're a hero no more, just an average guy doing average stuff.

I suspect the same will soon happen with cryogenics.

edited 4th Aug '10 10:04:51 AM by RawPower

'''YOU SEE THIS DOG I'M PETTING? THAT WAS COURAGE WOLF.Cute, isn't he?

my parents and grandparents grew up in communist china (my parents moved to the US), and i can tell you guys that i'm against the ways that communism was implemented. EVERY SINGLE TIME communism was implemented, totalitarian dictatorships that exploit the very people they were supposed to help results. Communism has killed millions of people, many times for BS reasons. Those countries are pretty much 1984 in real life. therefore, the people who implement communism are complete monsters.

however, considering how people here are talking about communism itself, i'll offer my opinion on that as well. it's a dumb ideology. the whole ideology is basically like a drug: it feels good for a little bit, but accomplishes nothing in the end, and its bad for you in real life. it is impossible to implement real communism. there are several hurdles that you need to pass to create a real communist society, and getting past step 1 is hard enough.

step 1: due to communism's bad track record, most people in the world won't be too supportive. good luck trying to find enough support. the last three communist countries are all pretty much withdrawn from the world and are close to collapse (well, except china which actually went away from pure communism to "capitalism with big government", which, although isn't much better, is still an improvement as evidenced by china's rapid economic growth). this is especially the case in america. hell, the only political party in america that has a worse chance at winning than the communists is the nazi party.

step 2: let's assume you scrap together enough votes. now, you need to eliminate the "rich" guys, who supposedly oppress the working class to make a quick buck. so, how do you beat them? with big government, of course. true communism has no government in the end, which is why many marxists say that the ussr, red china, north korea, and cuba are NOT communist. that might be true. however, the ONLY way you can eliminate the "rich" is with big government (it's pretty much the political version of Summon Bigger Fish ). now, communism is supposed to give up its power to the people and everyone lives happily working for the good of society. this is where implementation has always gone wrong in the past. the governments kick out the rich, and, more or less, replace them as an even worse group of oppressors than the previous bunch (considering how the "rich" sell you goods and services, while the government just simply taxes you).

Step 3: let's say that the government does give up power (which hasn't happened in every attempt at communism), and now the people work for the good of society. because of that, everyone pools together their wealth and redistributes it. now, it's possible for a society to function like that if, say, person A makes $250 and person B makes $150 and they pool together and split, with each person making $200. maybe person B had a bad day or something. this is the end result: a true communist society. it's also a society that will inevitably collapse. the previous scenario will not happen. why? it basically punishes the hard working and rewards the lazy. if you pull more than your own weight, the excess is taken away, and if you pull less than your own weight, society will top it off. so why work? hard work is tiring, uncomfortable, and altogether something that none of us really likes to do. what motivates us to work harder is because we hope we'll get rewarded. in communism, the reward is getting the same amount of money as the lazy bum down the street who doesn't work at all, and the punishment for that lazy bum is having your extra wealth that you contributed paying for his house/car/food/water/electrcity etc. in the end, no one will work hard (except for a few people who truely loves working hard and working for the good of society), which means less wealth is generated, which means less wealth is redistributed, which ends up with everyone being poor (and that's not even dwelling into the fact that technically, this is anarchy, and anarchy usually results in chaos).

therefore, my opinion is that communism is flawed from the idea all the way to implementation, which is why i am a devot capitalist.

I was with you until the last sentence, when you fell straight into the false fury. There are other approaches than total communism (which as you have demonstrated is flawed) and total capitalism.

I would have assumed this was obvious.

And you misspelled either devoted or devout.

Fight smart, not fair.

I personally find any ideology that has as part of its creed "kein Gott, kein Kaiser, kein Tribun" abhorrent. Especially the first clause.

No god, no king, no... something?

You should probably know that Christian, Muslim, and probably a few other -isms of socialism are existent.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Tribune, dear.

I'm aware of that. I'm talking about outright Marxism-Leninism.

Communist here in the Philippines have done absolutely nothing but murder. Their brand of communist rule mostly just a euphemism of gangster rule, which is "as we say, or we burn your house".

Not all dreams are meant to come true, otherwise there would be a lot of dead people.

That's what you get from the outgrowth of a guerrilla movement.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Why not turn yourself over to a cybernetic system of government? If we assume that it is possible to create an altruistic AI that has as its sole purpose the desire to help humans, and the necessary understanding of human psychology to know what that means (so none of that "kill everyone to stop suffering" silliness) and then set that AI to control government, you have a government that has the interests of its subject as its sole purpose, as opposed to Wealth or Power or Ideology. An AI dictator wouldn't necessarily be predisposed to a democratic poll or opinion-poll on an issue either, and it could be set to self-improve so that it becomes more and more efficient. It would essentially be an extension of the checks and balances of a bureaucratic system, and a formalization of that paper-machine, but without the failings of having to rely largely on human resources to do stupid things like "interpret the letter of the law". Now, I'm not well enough skilled in Friendly AI science to know if this is even possible, but I don't see a problem with benevolent AI rule.

As for communism, my problem with communism (as opposed to socialism and/or social democracy) is that it proposes, or at least I understand it that way, to eradicate class-differences and money. However, as the system reaches a significant size, it is necessary for someone (or something; see above) to manage things on that scale; these people then become powerful in some way, creating a difference in power that can be exploited by them to further the differences by unfairly allocating resources towards their own ends, as opposed to the good of the people. It might last for a while, but eventually someone will figure out that if they just take over, they can get an ever better life at the cost of others, who they don't care about in the first place.

I'm much more inclined to believe a system like socialism or social democracy can work, because socialism has more to do with putting the means of production in the hands of the people and eliminating profit margins, so while there might be some people who are better off than other people, the general people are in control of their own businesses to a much larger extent and there are no bourgeoisie to take profits into their own pockets before paying the workers.

Things I like: Ghost In The Shell |Serial Experiments Lain |Eden: It's an Endless World! |Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri |Aeon Natum Engel

Good on paper, but obviously hard to pull off in a society that's known capitalism for a long-ass while, and especially after Stalin and Mao's known... problems.

I wonder how long things were good in newly Soviet-ized Russia before the protests and Glorious Ruination?

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.

It's almost impossible to say, considering that Russia was at war with itself.

To be perfectly fair, though, Russia did go from being a semi-feudal agrarian hellhole with a mostly illiterate population to sending a man into space in the span of 60 years, 20 of which were spent in near or actual civil war and 5 of which were spent fighting a devastating war that destroyed all infrastructure west of Novgorod and killed 20 million people on their side. So that's kind of an accomplishment, I think; certainly the average Russian in 1980 was a lot better off than the average Russian in 1900, even if they weren't as well off as the average American at either time. The question is whether a capitalist system would have been better, not whether the planned economy succeeded at least to some extent; and I'm inclined to say it wouldn't have been. Compare Cuba to Haiti or Venezuela, for example; Cuba is undoubtedly better.

edited 18th Aug '10 1:52:14 AM by BonSequitur

My latest liveblog.

...And then they stagnated and fell apart.

They also kind of killed a lot of people and wasted resources on an useless nucular arsenal, although the latter was not entirely their fault.

My latest liveblog.

The thing is that Russia would have done a great deal better in agrarian income than in industrial exploits if it hadn't put forward the whole "collective farm" thing.

Or Stalin's reaction to the protests.

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.